Main image: Jo Malone London launched its limited-edition Veggies Collection. Courtesy of Jo Malone London
Grounded luxury
A new wave of luxury fragrances is turning to everyday produce to ground consumers in reality.
Luxury fragrance is digging into the vegetable patch. In 2026, humble ingredients such as tomatoes, carrots, beets, and pistachios are moving from kitchens and gardens into high-end scent launches, and brands are building increasingly tactile, food-led experiences around them.
The shift reflects a broader desire for fragrance to feel personal and rooted in everyday life. According to VML’s Future 100: 2026, 69% of people globally agree that the scent they use reflects their identity. As consumers seek fragrances that feel more distinctive, brands are moving beyond familiar florals and gourmands toward ingredients associated with gardens, markets and seasonal produce.
Prada Beauty made that connection literal in May, taking over Milan’s historic Frutteto Garibaldi for its Prada Spring Market. The activation placed Prada fragrance and cosmetics alongside flowers and fresh produce, borrowing the textures, colors and sensory rituals of a neighborhood market rather than the polished language of a traditional beauty counter. Runway Magazine described the concept as a way of embedding luxury into the tactile ritual of fruit and vegetable shopping, while retaining Prada’s elevated positioning.
The same idea became edible in London. In July, Loewe Perfumes transformed artisanal ice cream bar The Dreamery into a pistachio-green takeover to mark the launch of its new Pistachio scented candle. Visitors could eat a limited-edition pistachio ice cream while experiencing the candle itself, collapsing the distance between taste and smell. The collaboration ran from July 16 to 30, with The Dreamery’s facade repainted in the same pale green as Loewe’s candle vessel.
Jo Malone London has gone further into the community garden with its limited-edition Veggies Collection, launched in June. Scarlet Beetroot, Carrot Blossom and Velvety Butternut colognes sit alongside Green Tomato Vine home fragrance and Tomato Leaf hand wash. The collection grew out of visits to British gardens including Sissinghurst Castle. “There’s a raw beauty that you see in something that is rooted in the soil,” Céline Roux, Jo Malone London’s global head of fragrance, explains. “It’s so rich, there’s an earthiness to it, there’s an authenticity to it.” She describes the resulting aesthetic as a form of “textured freshness.”
The brand also extended the idea into physical experiences. A Vegetable Patch Experience was staged in Wilmslow in June, while the collection later appeared as a garden-themed pop-up at Hong Kong’s K11 Art Mall in July.
This is becoming more than a handful of eccentric launches. Cosmetics Business reports that vegetable-inspired scents are proliferating in 2026, including Voluspa’s Tomato Trellis, while Allure notes, rising consumer interest in notes including beets, cucumber and green tomato.
Deirdre Walters, co-founder and partner at global innovation agency Untapped Innovation, tells Cosmetics Business that years of gardening and houseplant culture have reshaped consumers’ olfactory expectations. “Consumers who have spent years tending plants, or simply living alongside them, have recalibrated their olfactory expectations in ways that are becoming commercially significant,” she says. “They recognize authenticity and are drawn to fragrances that smell of something real, something they can place and name.”
Luxury has traditionally signaled distance from the ordinary. These launches reverse that logic. A beet, tomato or pistachio is familiar, tactile and inexpensive, but translated through perfume, design and immersive retail, it acquires a new kind of desirability.
For beauty brands, grounded luxury offers a way to make fragrance feel both more distinctive and more accessible emotionally. The ingredient may be humble, but the experience around it can still feel rare. This shift indicates that today’s consumers crave authenticity and a multisensory connection to nature over distant, traditional exclusivity. Luxury brands are elevating familiar, everyday touchpoints through high-end design and immersive retail, proving that modern luxury is defined by storytelling and execution rather than the rarity of the raw material.
